Is the spirit of our late, beloved pooch inhabiting our home?

I’m brushing my teeth when I hear the exclamation: “What did you do?” Though muffled by the buzz of my electric toothbrush, I sense distress in the voice and, since I’m usually the one who does the exclaiming around the house (and in general), I’m curious.

In the few seconds it takes me to pad over to the bedroom to investigate, I have a pretty good idea of what I’m going to see. I was right. Almost.

There’s my husband, Jeremy, frowning while looking down at his side of our bed. The covers are pulled back and, occupying the real estate where his butt usually rests during the night, is a single dollar bill.

My response comes through a toothpaste-rimmed grin: “I shidn’t do shanything.” Jeremy eyeballs me suspiciously, before looking back down at the bed. The man does not believe me.

I ask him if he put it there.

The uneasy eyeballs dart back at me. “No, I didn’t,” he answers.

Me: “Well, you moved it from the top of the bedspread.”

Him: “No, I found it just like this.”

This is a change in the usual Migrating Money pattern to which I’ve lately become accustomed.

Me: “The money was under the covers?”

Him: “Yes, it was sitting right there,” Jeremy says, stabbing an accusatory finger at the bed.

“Well,” I say. “Granny’s back.” And with that, I shuffle back to the bathroom to spit out the minty remnants of toothpaste.

Even though there is no rational explanation for a dollar bill migrating from the ironing board approximately two feet away from our bed to Jeremy’s side of it, this has occurred a handful of times since our canine matriarch, Anise, aka “Granny,” died on November 2. There is no air-conditioning or fan breeze to propel the dollar across the room, no other dogs in the room to move it, no draft from closing the door. There is no “normal” explanation.

But now, somehow, the dollar is underneath the covers, in approximately the same spot. While this spooked Jeremy, it made me happy. Well, it spooked me a bit, too, because, for the first time, it was under the covers and Jeremy had found it. What did that mean?

I know Granny -- or rather, her spirit -- is responsible. I know this because, through the use of my crystal pendulum, she told me so. The process of using a crystal pendulum to speak with the dead, called “dousing,” is a form of kinesiology. Simply put: You use your energy to channel another’s.

After Granny died, I would see her out of the corner of my eye. Then I noticed little pieces of fur appearing on the bed, on my side. Then the Money Migration started. The first time I noticed it, I was surprised, but figured a dog (we have four) had found it and brought it up to the bed. Except there was no dollar on the floor and, if there had been, my dogs would have eaten it. These incidents occurred during the day and I always discovered the dollar.

There are people out there who will dismiss this as a load of crap. That is their prerogative. I only believe things I personally experience, and I have experienced plenty of, er, otherworldly incidents. So I was happy, not disturbed, when this all began.

Any psychologist will tell you that the grief process will affect people deeply, so deeply that they may see or hear “things.” While this may or may not be true, it’s not happening to me. I’m dealing with the tangible: Objects moving, as opposed to optical or auditory observations.

I decided to speak to some experts to see what they thought about the pet afterlife.

One Ottawa-based psychic medium, Matthew Stapley, who hosts the television show Psychic Insights with Matthew, told me he has clients who have returned home to find a television set turned on in front of where a deceased pet used to sit. Stapley also said that, although his specialty is communication with people more than with animals, it is more common for animals to communicate after death than for people to do so.

Another psychic medium, New York-based William Constantine, who holds a doctorate in metaphysics from the University of Metaphysics in Arizona, also believes animals are more spiritual than people because they live in the moment and are not so concerned with thinking.

“Animals live from the heart, not from the mind,” Constantine says. “They could be the greatest teachers in the world, if we let them.”

What about Granny? Has she assumed the educator role from the other side? Um, no.

“Spirits do pretty much what they want,” Constantine says. “Their job is not to convince us.”

Well, I didn’t need convincing. Sometimes, though, a client may be so intent on communicating with a particular animal that they might miss messages from other sprits and, in the spirit world (as in the physical one), it seems the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Or as Constantine puts it: “The spirit who talks the loudest is the one who has the floor.”

This made me wonder if Stapley, who told me that an older human female was trying to communicate with me, could be right. I had stopped dousing the other day when whoever was responding said they weren’t Granny.

One thing every psychic medium I consulted agrees on is that animals make themselves more available in the afterlife than humans do, and that energy is the link to all psychic connections. Terri Jay, a pet psychic and medium with 20 years’ experience, says she is able to communicate with the dead because of physics.

“Einstein and Tesla both wrote that everything is energy and everything has a vibration and frequency. All I do is pick up on vibrations and frequencies that other people miss,” Jay says. “Human beings and animals are 99-percent spiritual or energy beings in a one-percent physical body or meat suit. When we pass, the spirit and consciousness leave the body behind. But as the laws of physics tell us, you cannot destroy energy; you can only change it. Our consciousness and spirit (and that of our pets) continues on.”

Granny, it seems, is no exception.

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